Representations

The picture above translates to "This is not a pipe." It says this because it isn't a pipe; it's a picture of a pipe (a representation).

Everything in the media is a representation-everything we see is being represented. The selection process is:

·         The decision over what is chosen to be represented and what is rejected

·         The choices made when organising the representation

·         The options taken to focus the audience in a certain way

A theorist called White (1961) spoke of the gatekeepers – that is the people who are part of the decision making process in the construction of media texts. These can be the directors, the editors, the government or even the audience themselves. If this is the case, then while creating my music video, I was a gatekeeper f what messages i wanted to convey in the text.

A useful way of thinking about representation is that the meanings are created by this relationship between the producers, the text and the audience.

The representation is constructed with a set of ideas and values (producer’s intent/intended meaning).

The context of the representation is part of the representation (media language choices, anchorage, media form, placement/location, genre expectations, etc.)

The audience reads to this representation and this depends on their own personal interpretational context: age, gender, political, religions, nationality, etc. (negotiated meaning).

So my intended meaning of my music video would have been for the audience to feel happy with themselves despite what other influences may say. However, depending on my audiences interpretational context, this meaning could become negotiated or decoded into another meaning that I haven't even thought about.

Audiences Theories

Texts are meaningless until they are read/decoded by an audience. The audience are the ones who watch the texts and therefore generate the revenue by doing so.

The first attempt to explain how audiences react to the mass media was the Hypodermic Needle Model, composed in the 1920's when media was first being understood. This model suggests that audiences are passive receivers to the information given out by these media texts. Governments thought then by the power of the media, they could create a proper gander to make people believe what they wanted. Of course, this model seems to be irrelevant these days, as we are active receivers. We receive the information but interpret it for our own. 


Extending on the idea of active receivers, the Reception Theory to explain how the mass media effected their lifestyles and how they receive and interpret their messages. This was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding of the relationship between a text and its audience. The text is encoded by the producer (me in my music video) and is decoded by the audience. There may be differences between these codings, showing that messages can be polysemic (have many meanings). Using recognised codes and conventions though the producer can position the audience and thus create a certain amount of agreeement on what the code means. This is known as a preferred reading.

Presentation I did about creativity

Here is a powerpoint presentation I did in one of our lessons about the creativity thought processes I went through when creating my AS and A2 coursework. I decided to post this as it does show the creative planning of A2 coursework: